Electronic
composer and technological pioneer Wendy Carlos is
celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of her revolutionary
Switched-On
Bach (the best
selling classical album of all time!) with the release of
the Switched-On
Boxed Set, a
deluxe restoration of her four analog Bach albums:
Switched-On Bach, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Switched-On
Bach II, and Switched-On Brandenburgs.

The albums, she explains,
"have been remastered with 20-bit 'Hi-D' technology from the
original session tapes, with no re-mixing of any kind. If
you notice a few EQ differences, that's because the
distortion needed to squash the recording onto the
limitations of an LP have been removed." The set also
includes intriguing enhanced CD sections and Carlos'
meticulously written 200+ page illustrated booklets that
share stories about her Moog synthesizers and how she and
producer Rachel
Elkind recorded the
music.

After the first album, and
as synth technology improved, Carlos tackled the synthesis
of more complex orchestral instruments and vocal sounds.
Coincidentally, she created a Moog plus vocoder version of
the choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony right as
director Stanley Kubrick began work on Clockwork
Orange (1971,
East
Side Digital).
Carlos also contributed the chilling electronic score for
Kubrick's The Shining (1980); the futuristic music for
Disney's Tron;
and the score for Woundings,
a 1998 British anti-war movie.

Carlos continues to push
the envelope of every technological advance, and she
constantly investigates the compositional possibilities of
alternate tunings. An important, albeit tedious, part of
Carlos' life was securing the rights to all her works back
from CBS, Audion, and other labels, and restoring the master
tapes. Eventually, these out-of-print albums will be
available through East
Side Digital.

Her website,
www.wendycarlos.com
is one of the most fascinating on the internet. A complete
cyber tour of her album descriptions, technical notes,
anecdotes (including remembrances of director Stanley
Kubrick), eclipse photos, sketches, innovative globe
projections, and kritter corner can take hours. So many
interests. How does she do it all, and find brainspace for
her legendary pun-a-thons?

"Before I die, I want to
find out what lies beyond all these horizons," she says.
"And I'm doing it for the best reason in the world: I'm
curious."

NAV:
Congratulations on putting the set to bed.

WENDY: It's done!
This was such a big project for one that is not wholly new
material. I'm pleased it came out so well.

NAV:
I'm old enough to remember Pre-Switched.
Electronic music was like some obnoxious mating of a
catfight and a garbage compactor. Or electronic music meant
the eerie Theremin, the wooo-oooo-woo sound they used on
cheesy invader-from-Mars movies. Do you have a sense that
you took electronic music to where it could be
accepted?

WENDY: That's what
people tell me. I was lucky enough to be at the
Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where Vladimir
Ussachevsky and Otto Luening were teaching. I thought what
ought to be done was obvious, to use the new technology for
appealing music you could really listen to. Why wasn't it
being used for anything but the academy approved "ugly"
music? You know, the more avant-garde than thou-ers, atonal,
or formally tedious serial, twelve-tone straitjacket. My
beloved field was decimated, turned into something quite
hateful. It's like we had to start all over again. C-major,
C-major, C-major! Let's move on to D-major, already.Anyway, it's nice to
have demonstrated -- which was all it was -- that the medium
was far more flexible and capable than one might have been
aware. That's all Switched-On Bach was meant to be.

NAV:
I was there with the rest in saying, "this electronic
music gives me a headache." But the mainstream was also numb
to the classics, so you brought them an appreciation of Bach
as well.

WENDY: I was
certainly not about any revival of Bach. It was just lovely
music, eminently suited for this stage of the development of
Bob Moog's new synthesizer.

NAV:A perfect match then?

WENDY: Now, we'd say
so. But then, people laughed at us, saying that interest
would soon peter out. Then they came back and said, "Ah, we
got it! We always knew you could do it!"Oh, oh! The gray cat's
dry heaving a hairball. Just a minute. Subi's
okay, but he's eighteen years old, so I have to watch
him.

NAV:By the way, great job on your website. I've spent hours
there and have just scratched the surface. It took an hour
just to read about your fuzzy critters.

WENDY: I love
animals -- I have three Siamese
cats and a terrier
-- and would love to have a horsey, but it wouldn't be happy
in Manhattan.

NAV:Many modern composers starting creating post-MIDI. They
were given their sounds on a silver platter. I'm not sure
they all really appreciate where...

WENDY: None of us
really know what giants' shoulders we stand on. Should we
have a responsibility to know what and who came before us?
It's not necessary to play or compose music, but then, I
look back to Bob Moog and the others who came before me, and
I'm grateful. I was lucky enough to be there when electronic
music was still an infant, and I was there to help it take
some of the steps needed to mature into a real medium.There were so many
stages necessary for the creation of electronic music: the
Ondes Martinot and the Theremin -- many devices, actually,
from over a hundred years ago. The original synthesizer was
built by RCA, and the second of only two models was located
at the Columbia lab. That's where Bob Moog got the name for
his device. He combined many different modules in one
cabinet, and this collection of tools is what Bob called the
synthesizer.

NAV:
Could you give an idea of what it took back then to
create just one measure of Bach's music? No, to create a
chord. No, a note. I guess you'd have to start with whether
it was a violin sound or a harpsichord. Where did you
start?

WENDY: With Bach.
It's easy if you're doing someone else's music, so I went
and bought a score. What a concept! And Bach composed his
great works during a period that had just begun to be aware
of the orchestral instruments, so the music wasn't tied
closely to the orchestration. I wouldn't have wanted to go
tampering with Mozart or Haydn. But Bach was a two-edged
sword. I didn't have to work out any notes. BUT, for me as a
composer, it was almost a disaster. I got identified with
Bach like Nimoy was with Star-Trek's Spock!Hardware-wise, we had
to use multi-tracking recorded on one eight-track machine,
fairly racy hardware for its day. And since I didn't have
much money, I built my own unit.Then I got the Moog and
worked with Bob to make a prototype of a touch-sensitive
keyboard. Can you believe, the standard keyboard was not
touch-sensitive until the late 1970s!? So, now I had a
keyboard that could make the notes come alive. So I worked
with some friends trying jazz. We tried rock n' roll. And I
tried my own compositions, which were not the ugly forms you
referred to earlier. However, the music that seemed most
likely to turn into a record was Bach. So Rachel
Elkind, my
producer, and I started with the two-part "Invention in
F."

NAV:
How did you make the individual sounds?

WENDY: There wasn't
much to making the sounds itself. I studied physics and
music and knew a lot about the basics of timbre and
acoustics. The Moog wasn't all that elaborate. There were a
couple of oscillators, and you adjusted them to track the
octaves. You would pick a wave shape from the four
available: sine, triangle, pulse wave, and sawtooth. There
was a white noise source, and a filter to reduce the high
end of the wave, to make it sound more mellow, to add
resonance, or take out the bottom. Then there were
envelopers that came from Ussachevsky's ideas: attack time,
decay, sustain, and release. Set the thing to ramp up at
some rate: slow for an organ or fast for a plucked string.
Make it decay immediately for a harpsichord, or sustain for
a piano. Have the final release time based on the need,
short and dry, or longer for the vibrating body of a cello
or drum. Easy.

NAV:Right. Piece-a-cake.

WENDY: It's not all
schematic diagrams and such. You could hear the adjustments.
You'd dial up something, listen to it, and keep hitting the
note over and over, letting your inner ear guide you while
adjusting with the dials. So we would work up a sound and
then record it. You try this, try that.

NAV:
So, you fiddled with dials until you got a violin.
(Hey, I made a pun!) How different from today's MIDI
samples. You want a Strad? or a Guarnari?

WENDY: Well, canned
sound to a musician is like clip art is to the artist. The
only way you can do anything of any value in art is by
knowing how to do it yourself. Of course that's not the
mentality right now. My opinion is very unpopular, and many
people consider me an elitist. Is it so bad to keep
standards up? We expect an Olympic athlete to be
disciplined, to eat right, to work out daily, and to have a
great coach so they can be as good as they can be. So why
not have standards for artists?With the modern
keyboards, there's a democratization of music, just as in
the past, every kid had to take piano lessons. This is
wonderful in a way, but how many went on to play as a
soloist? In the case of composers, have the technological
advances increased the output of masterpieces? I don't think
so. I don't claim to write masterpieces, but I don't stop
until it's the best I can do.The musicians working
in the medium now have these advanced tools, but they should
not be stuck using only MIDI and prerecorded sounds. If they
want to learn how the medium ticks, they should open the
hood, get inside, and get dirty. And they'll be grateful for
every learning, for every discovery. It's wonderful, but
damn, you have to have the motivation. And the
curiosity!

NAV:So, you did create your own trumpet, organ, and violin .
. . and then . . .

WENDY: Tempo. Rachel
helped me nail the tempo by putting down a click track. If,
when I put the notes down against it, it sounded too fast --
too bad! -- I did it over again. Then we'd want a
ritardando. Who thinks of a ritard when you're making a
click track? So we would adjust for that. And that keyboard?
Amazingly clunky with all those touch-sensing mechanical
gadgets in it. I had to clatter away slower than actual
speed; you could never play faster than moderato. Sixteenth
notes at a good clip? Forget it!In the end, it was a
lot of bookkeeping, and not as intuitive as a modern
keyboard. I wish I had Digital
Performer back
then. But, nope. Wonder if I could work with it again? Maybe
it's like a bicycle and you don't forget.

NAV:But, using today's technology, the Bach wouldn't have
been as special.

WENDY: I suppose
you're right. If you're a pioneer, you get to have the
arrows in the ass, I guess.

NAV:
How much could you record in one take?

WENDY: If the tonal
quality didn't change much over the phrase, you could get
down a measure or two. The Moog was very unstable and would
go out of tune constantly. You would play a phrase, back up,
and check. Retune and continue. To create a chord, you'd
play the second line, then the third. With counter point,
you'd play the melodies that wove together. Eventually, we
got all the parts to make the piece.

NAV:
Hearing Switched-On-Bach probably moved me as much as
watching those very first television images of the moon
landing. Hearing the didgeridoo for the first time also had
a mindbending impact on me. Where are the new frontiers of
sound?

WENDY: So, Carol,
how many other moon landings, didgeridoos, or peak
experiences does it take for you to be equally impressed?
What about all the best life experiences in between? We
always remember our first exposures, I guess that's only
human. And it's easier to be impressed when we're young.The field of electronic
music is still able to move, but with less noticeable
refinements. But there is plenty of room for improvements:
We still don't have a general-purpose instrument. The
closest I have is the Synergy and the GDS, on which I made
Beauty
in the Beast, and
the Kurzweill K2000/2500, which is flexible and very clean
sounding.But I'm so impatient.
As an insider, I feel like the developers have been smoking
far too many joints. "Oh, wow, man. Look at that. There's a
universe of sounds in there!" No, there is not! Wake up!
Let's get going, already. At some point in your life, you
fatigue out and realize it just may not happen. They aren't
moving, and I can't make it happen all by myself. However,
making music is not dependent on that, so I keep
composing.

NAV:Do you think the re-release of this set will box you back
to Bach? or will it give you fresh platform as a
composer?

WENDY: I'm aware
that the knife will be there with both edges. I am a
composer, so I hope that the focus of this interview is not
"Wendy Carlos, the performer of Bach on the synthesizer."
This was my payment of dues (which unfortunately never
stopped) to show that I had an ability with the new media to
make real music. I thought I then would be allowed to
perform and record my own music, but I got locked in with
Bach. People hate to see any of us, once stereotyped into
one egg-compartment, overflow into several other
compartments. I guess you get only one cell per
customer.You were asking about
new sounds; you probably haven't heard Tales
of Heaven and Hell.
(Note: Carol
has since listened and written
a thoughtful, enthusiastic
review.,
and offered an example of a new art-form, with her jocular
Poem-Review.) It's
the scariest recording that's been created in a long time,
and I'll bet it's quite different than anything you've ever
heard. Are they "breakthrough sounds"? No. But they are
different and they have refinements and they are very
musically handled.Why do we always search
for something we've never heard before? If your pursuit is
not to be as good as you can be, but an obsession to be new,
then you've thrown away your art. Art has to be stable to
some extent. The medium has matured and is capable of great
depth and expression, more than the SOB technology could
ever hope to be. Now that the technology has matured, people
should try to make the great music, the meaty music, and not
cave in to every commercial cliché.But that's just me
talking. For those who just consider music as just a career,
this is probably bad advice. Forget I said it. But if you're
doing it as an artist, then by all means, aim for the
good.

NAV:Think you'll ever run out of ideas?

WENDY: Hardly. The
whole palette of life is wonderful. I used to worry about
running out of ideas, and now I worry I can touch only a
tiny fraction of what I want to do. In music, alternative
tunings are an option. It's like throwing away the straight
jacket of the twelve-tone, equal tempered scale. But people
can get stuck simply discovering the new scales, and then
write no good music for it.Now as I get older, I
can look back. I realize that I was a young whippersnapper
to think that I could be a performer when I hadn't paid the
dues. It's embarrassing that my Bach records are placed
alongside Glenn Gould and Horowitz. I don't think that I'm a
particularly great performer even of my own music, but with
the Digital Performer, I am able to refine things in a
sensitive way, keep the spirit that I first had and still
make it polished. I am quite satisfied with "Tales of Heaven
and Hell;" it's probably the best performing I've done on an
album. Every note and sound is "just so."When listening to all
the Bach pieces again, I was aware of the fluffs, wrong
tempos, and the passages the Moog just couldn't quite
negotiate. But I was surprised that most of them have such
spirit. I marvel that I had such tenacity back then; the way
we worked was so tedious, it should have removed all traces
of spontaneity.So, I'm perfectly happy
to set my Bach beside my most recent works. Altogether, it's
part of the fulcrum of how an artist's whole life should be
seen. It's a little surreal seeing your own life as having
periods -- early, middle, and late -- but there was an
innocence back then. It really was, as you mentioned, the
stuff of the first moon landing, of leaving those first
footprints in the dust.